3. In which production of 2018 did Hudson’s Bay blankets and plaid scarves (and bathrobes) figure prominently in the design?

(a) Oh! Christmas Tree

(b) Twelfth Night

(c) Pretty Goblins

(d) A Christmas Carol

(e) Slumberland Motel

4. In which production of 2018 did clocks of every size and shape figure prominently in the design?

(a) Origin of the Species

(b) What A Young Wife Ought To Know

(c) Miss Bennet: Christmas At Pemberley

(d) Infinity

5. In what play of 2018 did a celebrated literary recluse, à la J.D. Salinger, figure prominently?

(a) The Finest of Strangers

(b) Going to St. Ives

(c) The Listening Room

(d) Skirts on Fire

(e) Old Stock

6. Which of the following playwrights had (at least) two productions on Edmonton stages in 2018?

(a) Collin Doyle

(b) Elena Belyea

(c) Hannah Moscovitch

(d) Stewart Lemoine

(e) Conni Massing

7. In which production of 2018 did a saint show off his own decapitated head?

(a) Matara

(b) The Importance of Being Earnest

(c) Children of God

(d)All Shook Up

(e) Do This In Memory Of Me

8. Which of the following characters did Julien Arnold not play in 2018?

(a) a priest

(b) a songwriter with writer’s block

(c) a miser

(d) an aspirational cross-dresser

(e) a First World War major

9. Which of the following is NOT the name of an Edmonton indie theatre…?

(a) Dammitammy Productions

(b) Theatre of the New Heart

(c) Heartstopper Theatre

(d) Cardiac Theatre

(e) Bumble Bear Productions

10. Which of the following was the mascot of the 2018 Edmonton Fringe?

(a) a dinosaur

(b) a B-movie monster

(c) a harlequin

(d) a dancing bear

(e) a demented acrobat

11. Which of the following theatre companies produced shows this year with “Blood” in the title?

(a) The Maggie Tree

(b) Mayfield Dinner Theatre

(c) Wild Side Productions

(d) Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

(e) Pyretic Productions

12. This year’s SkirtsAfire feature production, The Romeo Initiative, was set in what city?

(a) London

(b) Verona

(c) Vienna

(d) Bonn

(e) Toronto

13. In which production, seen on an E-town stage in 2018, did the following lines occur:

(a) “ignorance is a delicate exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone.”

(b) “we’ve done it all before, now we’re back to get some more….”

(c) “what do you call an Indian on a bike?”

(d) “the minute I saw the grenade belt I knew something was wrong”

(e) “turn left, genuflect, put the bells down quietly.”

(f) “we’re ordered to enjoy the show whether we like it or not.”

(g) “this morning I was working in a diner. Now I’m serving champagne to high society.”

(h) “There has to be more to life than reading and sewing….”

(i) “time is a fake.”

(j) “is it presumptuous of me to expect a third resurrection?”

(k) “we shall go down like ninepins.”

(l) “Who knows what I mean when I say the word ‘gunman’?”

(m) “If God had intended man to fly, he wouldn’t have made him so squishy.”

14. In Sheldon Elter’s Métis Mutt, which returned to Theatre Network this year in a new production, the protagonist sings a number from what musical?

(a) My Fair Lady

(b) Marry Me A Little

(c) Company

(d) She Loves Me

(e) Oklahoma

15. Name the playwright:

(a) Pretty Goblins

(b) Blood of Our Soil

(c) Betroffenheit

(d) Poison

(e) The Humans

(f) Do This In Memory Of Me

(g) The Silver Arrow: The Untold Story of Robin Hood

16. Which production this year was set in an air hangar?

(a) The Comedy of Errors

(b) The Comedy Company

(c) The Humans

(d) The Silver Arrow

(e) Dead Centre of Town XI

17.. What is the Randomizer?

(a) an Orc-like figure in Die-Nasty’s Lord of Thrones

(b) the lottery in Fly Me To The Moon

(c) Rapid Fire Theatre’s method of picking Theatresports teams

(d) a method of choosing Fringe shows

(e) an audience interaction technique often used in cabaret performances

18. In Broken Tailbone, the Carmen Aguirre creation seen at the 2018 Canoe Festival, the audience learned to …

(a) dance

(b) pronounce and use the Cree word for “love”

(c) sing a traditional Canadian ballad

(d) pray for peace

(e) use headphones

19. Which of the following festivals are NOT part of the annual Chinook Series in February?

(a) Sound Off

(b) Deep Freeze

(c) Canoe

(d) Fringe

(e) Expanse

20. The family dinner is a classic site of tension and conflict in theatre, especially when there’s an outsider in the mix. Which of the following productions of 2018 prominently featured a dinner scene?

In Neil Grahn’s The Comedy Company, an infantry division of First World War fighting men, amidst the nightmare of unremitting horrors,are ordered to create light-hearted musical comedy They are a hit; they tour the Western Front.

The vivid new play, spun from a true Canadian story, is an homage to the power of comedy — a graphic manifesto of the link between comedy and tragedy. And some of its funniest scenes involved recruitment, auditions, brainstorming. “You have that showbiz je ne said quoi,” teases the casting director (Andrew MacDonald-Smith).

It’s been a desperately hard and crazy year, in a world of global warming and political chilling. And yet there’s something about the human connectedness of live theatre — in both the creation and the experiencing of it — that gives us a sense of renewable possibility. In A Lesson In Brio, Teatro La Quindicina, a company devoted to comedy, defined it as a contagious animation that attracts people, and thereby changes your life.

“You’re going to get out alive,” says the eerily amplified inner voice of a man who’s teetering on the threshold between a terrible past and a mysteriously unsquelchable sense of a future, in Betroffenheit, one of 2018’s most remarkable productions. And there’s wonder in that.

“You gotta live in the world to get to the truth,” as one of the stellar songs in 2b theatre’s Old Stock has it. Hold that thought as we look back on the year on E-town stages, where the supple creativity and ingenuity of our theatre artists, veterans and newcomers alike, continue to challenge and prevail.

MEMORABLE PRODUCTIONS OF 2018 (in no particular order)

Cole Humeny and Merran Carr-Wiggin in What A Young Wife Ought To Know, Theatre Network. Photo by Ian Jackson.

What A Young Wife Ought To Know: Marianne Copithorne’s impeccably acted Theatre Network production (starring Merran Carr-Wiggin, Cole Humeny and Bobbi Goddard) made of this Hannah Moscovitch play — one of three by the playwright we saw this year — a funny, horrifying, and heart-wrenching love and coming-of-age story, and a cautionary tale from the feminist palette. What we have gained can be lost.

Terry and the Dog:This quietly powerful and mysterious new play by Collin Doyle — a playwright with a particular gift for marrying black comedy and tragedy — is a chronicle of a recovering alcoholic haunted by his sins. In a fascinating way, as Dave Horak’s subtle Edmonton Actors Theatre production revealed, it goes far beyond the cruder notion of flashbacks to suggest that reality is permeable, that the past is superimposed on the present, and ghosts live.

Pretty Goblins: Strikingly, two of the year’s best new plays concern themselves with the heartbreaking price tag on addiction. Beth Graham’s Pretty Goblins, inspired by the wild Christina Rossetti poem Goblin Market, explores that mysterious and tragic seduction — beyond heredity, environment and chemistry and tumbling into the eerier nightmare of destiny — in twin sisters. Brian Dooley’s Workshop West production, starring Miranda Allen and Nadine Chu, was an unnerving horror story of the lure of the monster world.

Betroffenheit: See above. A stunningly original dance/theatre probe into the very marrow of limitless grief and the bewilderment and paralysis that follow great trauma. Crystal Pite’s production, a collaboration between Vancouver’s Electric Company and her own Kidd Pivot that came to us a joint Brian Webb Dance Company/Citadel venture, was theatrically ingenious in every way. Utterly memorable.

Meg Roe, Alessandro Juliani in Onegin, Arts Club Theatre. Photo by David Cooper.

Onegin: A playful, theatrically exhilarating, and hugely entertaining original rock musical fashioned by Vancouver’s Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hill from the Russian story of a bored aristocrat messing with people’s lives. The Arts Club production, starring the magnetic Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, arrived here under the Catalyst Theatre flag. Operatic in its extravaganza of feeling, accessible, and a whole lot of fun in the multiple ways it engaged the audience and knew about itself.

The Comedy Company: This first full-length play by comedy veteran Neil Grahn found a fascinating story from the archive where Canadians rarely venture: Canadian history. It ventured boldly into the no-man’s-land between comedy and tragedy to reveal a special, even redemptive, relationship between the two (and it only faltered when it annotated). John Hudson’s Shadow Theatre premiere production starred a quintet of top Edmonton actors, and their chemistry in an improbable venture — front-line World War I soldiers creating light musical comedy for the troops — irresistible.

The cast of The Finest of Strangers, Teatro La Quindicina. Photo by Mat Busby Photography.

The Finest of Strangers: In Stewart Lemoine’s enigmatic new Teatro La Quindicina play, a coming-of-age story in reverse, is a comedy with a musing bent. A man (Jeff Haslam) finds himself unexpectedly exploring the mysteries, long buried, of his own past, and rediscovering the people who lived in it. When he revisits his boyhood house, he finds himself unable to leave it; we share his astonishment with him at every turn.

Métis Mutt: Sheldon Elter’s astonishing solo show was returned to us, rethought and rewritten, in a new Ron Jenkins production at Theatre Network. A horrifying story of domestic violence, turmoil, booze and drugs, racism, trauma, constant relocations — the raw materials of his own life — told in songs, comedy routines, dramatic scenes — told by a series of Sheldon Elters at different ages. The performer is charismatic, and his coming-of-age story of reinvention through theatre came of age in Jenkins’ stunning production.

Bears: Matthew MacKenzie’s spirited, bold, and ingenious dark comedy about pipelines — which already puts it in a category all its own before you even consider its self-deprecating sense of humour — couldn’t be more NOW, of course. It returned to Edmonton briefly this year in a touring production (newly choreographed, in witty fashion, by Monica Dotter) that chronicles a wild chase across the mountains to the sea. Sheldon Elter again starred as a Métis oil worker on the lam who finds himself being assimilated into the bounty and beauty of nature.

Michelle Diaz and Jocelyn Ahlf in Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Plain Jane Theatre. Photo by Marc J. Chalifoux.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: In a #MeToo year, Kate Ryan’s dizzying low-budget Plain Jane production — saturated in colour, energy, temper, crazy accents, mad plot collisions — of the kooky David Yazbek/Jeffrey Lane musical screwball (inspired by the Almodóvar movie), hit a resonant note. If women are going to have relationships with men, they’d better not lose their senses of either absurdity or self.

Hamlet: At the centre of the fresh, vigorous Freewill Shakespeare Company production directed by Marianne Copthorne was a stunning performance by Hunter Cardinal, a young actor of exciting skill, intelligibility, and smarts (see below). .

MEMORABLE PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR, a small selection of the riches

Ric Reid — In The Humans, Jackie Maxwell’s Citadel/Canadian Stage co-production of a contemporary family drama of real menace,Reid captured the escalating tension of a patriarch tattered by his efforts to suppress a dark secret and keep fear at bay. A superb performance matched by Laurie Paton as his prickly and maddening wife.

Lawrence Libor — a newcomer to the Edmonton scene, he shone in the Citadel production of the musical fairy tale Once as a moody Irish street musician spinning songs from disappointment and regret, until he nearly succumbs.

Ryan Parker — In Hannah Moscovitch’s Infinity at Theatre Network, a play that attempted to domesticate the idea of time, he negotiated the difficult task of conveying intellectual foment and excitement onstage, as a theoretical physicist, torn between his study of time and his lack of it in his own domestic life. A moving leading performance from an actor we’re more accustomed to seeing in character roles.

Jocelyn Ahlf —As the rueful, wounded, then exasperated Pepa in the Plain Janes’ Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the musical. She hit all the right notes as an actress who’s just been dumped by her lover, by voicemail. And speaking of right notes, there’s evidently nothing that Ahlf can’t sing.

Robert Benz in Terry and the Dog, Edmonton Actors Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker.

Robert Benz — In Terry and the Dog the actor delivered a wonderfully restrained performance as a man haunted by the effects of his behaviour as an alcoholic, doomed to live and re-live the past. .

Sheldon Elter – in two performances this year, in his own Métis Mutt and as Floyd, turning imperceptibly into a grizzly in Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears, he confirmed, vividly, that not only is he a magnetic presence onstage, but he’s an actor of real force and physical eloquence.

Mikaela Davies — as the neglected middle sister in Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, she conjured, with exquisite comic timing, a bookish misfit who comes defiantly into her own in the course of this romantic comedy sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

Patricia Zentilli — her riotous comic performance as a “corporate narrative consultant” and “fund-raising facilitator” in Conni Massing’s Matara, which premiered at Workshop West, wickedly tapped into the intonation and cadence of spin doctors everywhere. Arts companies know that sound.

Braydon Dowler-Coltman — a witty, furiously ironic Mercutio, who could flay you with a phrase, in the Romeo and Juliet undertaken by the actors doing an illicit staged reading in Shakespeare’s R&J, remounted (and still powerful) in 2018 by Kill Your Television.

Alessandro Juliani — as the bored, louche, self-infatuatedtitle aristocrat of Onegin, matched by Meg Roe as the quiet bookworm who discovers passion only to be cruelly rebuffed by him.

Kristi Hansen and Belinda Cornish — as the pair of twin masters, the Antipholi, in Dave Horak’s neon Freewill Shakespeare Festival production of The Comedy of Errors, set during a vintage B-Hollywood shoot.They unleash exponential new dimensions of mystification in every encounter and transaction when they end up in the same town.

Merran Carr-Wiggin — a sense of dawning realization was the slow burn of the title character in What A Young Wife Ought To Know,a girl who comes of age as a woman, a wife, and a mother, and discovers the heartbreaking price tag on passion. It gave Marianne Copthorne’s production a terrible urgency.

Holly Turner — as the eccentric, shrewd but genial archaeologist in Origin of the Species at Northern Light Theatre. She brings the four-million-year-old woman she’s excavated back home, and starts lessons in contemporary life.

Hunter Cardinal — took on the most celebrated role in the English theatre and created his own kind of Hamlet — an impulsive, passionate, funny young man, tuned to every frequency of hyporisy, grief-stricken, and battered by betrayals and losses.

Amber Borotsik — in Poison, this remarkable actor created an indelible portrait of a woman frozen on the spot by life-filling grief and loss, unable to move forward and knowing it.

Mark Meer and Ron Pederson — as Jack and Algernon in Teatro La Quindicina’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, they calibrated between them a sense, subtly differentiated, of the absurdity of English manners, the one hitting more notes of suave, the other breezier, daffier. Highly amusing.

Tiffany Tregarthen and Jonathon Young in Betroffenheit. Photo by Michael Slobodian.

AND IN OTHER HIGHLIGHTS…

Prop of the year: the red banner, used in a startling number of ways in Kevin Sutley’s production of Shakespeare’s R&J.

Improv concept of the year: Leona Brausen and Davina Stewart play Gertrude Lawrence and Alice B. Toklas in a sitcom setting with Jackie Gleason overtones. “Hey Alice, what’s for dinner?” is a line you might well hear in Gertie and Alice. It happens monthly at the Grindstone Comedy Theatre.

Retirement of the year: After 19 seasons, Tom Wood’s superlative adaptation of A Christmas Carol will give way in 2019 to a new adaptation of the Dickens’ classic at the Citadel.

The 2018 award for theatrical compression: In Macbeth Muet, which came to the Fringe from Montreal’s Fille du Laitier, two actors created the characters and the brutal action of the story from an assortment of household objects. And it dispensed with Shakespeare’s words altogether. Violent, sexy, playful, and high-impact.

The stage movement award for 2018: the sheer dramatic and theatrical force of Crystal Pite’s choreography for Betroffenheit made it inseparable from the story of a man imprisoned by trauma, struggling to break free. The dancers from her Kidd Pivot company can do anything; they collapse, they re-form, and in the person of Tiffany Tregarthan, they propel themselves across the stage in ways the rest of the species hasn’t discovered.

The 2018 award for urgent topicality in theatre: a tie between Theatre Yes’s Viscosity, and the Punctuate!/ Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts production of Matthew MacKenzie’s Bears. The former fashioned fascinating one-on-on encounters (based on real-life interviews) with people working in the oil industry. The latter: I give you one word, PIPELINES. Runner-up: Unexpectedly, Hannah Moscovitch’s What A Young Wife Ought To Know had the unnerving effect of reminding us in the new world of conservative backslide that while the world has evolved in its attitudes towards female sexuality, the gains are always precarious.

Ainsley Hillyard and Jezel in Jezebel, At The Still Point, Bumble Bear Productions. Photo supplied.

Casting innovation of the year: In Jezebel, At The Still Point, a production which made the theatre term “two-hander” impossible to use, Ainsley Hillyard co-starred with her French bulldog in an exploration of time.

Production number of the year: Nadeem Phillip as a French entertainer in Onegin, who provided the Edmonton theatre season with its only example of knee choreography atop a grand piano. Tied with the movement score by which six actors, armed with expert lighting on a mostly bare stage, created the Battle of Vimy Ridge in Hardline Productions’ Redpatch.

Children of God, by Corey Payette, Urban Ink Productions at the Citadel. Photo by David Cooper

Experiment of the year: In Children of God, which came to the Citadel, the brilliant Corey Payette domesticated a story about the lingering trauma of residential schools by marrying it to a musical theatre-type score, with pop power ballads and the rest. Did it work? Not quite. But it bravely brought a terrible long-hidden Canadian story the kind of unavoidable accessibility that it needs.

Shakespeare’s Will, Thou Art Here Theatre. Photo by Nico Humby.

Ensemble chemistry of the year: A tie between The Comedy Company company, an ensemble of Edmonton’s top actors and Andrew Ritchie’s Thou Art Here production of Shakespeare’s Will, with a quintet of actors playing Anne Hathaway.

Bright idea of 2018: There were many. The award goes to the Emerging Company Showcase devised jointly by Edmonton’s Azimuth and Calgary’s Downstage Theatre, which dismisses the long-held but arbitrary boundary between the two cities like so much lint. Their production: Cardiac Theatre’s production of Michaela Jefferey’s The Listening Room, a sharp-eared dystopian exploration of youthful anger and disillusionment about the fate of revolutions.

The big-impact-in-small-role department: (a)Louise Lambert in the scene-stealing role of the diner waitress in Stewart Lemoine’s screwball Skirts On Fire, revived in 2018 at Teatro La Quindicina, and as the Greek temptress (who can’t stop looking at her cellphone) in the otherwise undistinguished “relationship comedy” Sirens, which played the Fringe in an Atlas Theatre production. (b) Jesse Gervais was out-and-out hilarious as the furiously unsmiling and unamused career soldier who is enlisted — in a quintessential theatre joke — as the director of light musical comedy for the troops in The Comedy Company.

Dubious idea of 2018: At the exciting moment in theatre history when barriers — in gender, ethnic identity, age, discipline — are being shaken down by theatre artists, Edmonton’s Sterling Awards have opted to separate comedy and drama in award categories. I predict this will be problematic. Since, as The Comedy Company set about proving and most of Shakespeare’s “comedies” testify so eloquently, the distinction is a way of marginalizing comedy. And much of the most important stage work is about crossing boundaries.

Give yourself a holiday treat this week. This week on E-town stages, you can feel the holiday spirit in a live radio play (It’s A Wonderful Life), a Christmas panto (Little Red Riding Hood), or a play (Oh! Christmas Tree, A Christmas Carol, The Best LittleNewfoundland Christmas Pageant…Ever!). (Note to self: This is not the moment to be jaded about the holiday season, aural battering by Mariah Carey at the mall notwithstanding. And I have put my morbid interpretation of Frosty The Snowman on hold till January.)

THE LIVE RADIO PLAY: At the Grindstone Theatre in Strathcona, where cozy is a given, the Whyte Avenue Players return us to a bona fide Christmas classic — a seasonal counterpart to the Victorian skinflint and his ghostly late-night tutors.

A Wonderful Life is the story of George Bailey, the decent small-town Little Guy snatched from despair in the nick of time on Christmas Eve by a guided tour through his own past.

“You’ve been given a great gift, George. A chance to see what the world would be like without you,” says Clarence Oddbody ASC (angel second class) in the Philip Van Doren Stern story. George can’t seem to catch a break with his life, his hopes, his dreams. He’s been cornered by a non-stop barrage of petty cruelties, commitments, and compromises. Which is why he finds himself on a bridge ready to jump until Clarence, a wingless guardian angel, takes on his case.

The most famous incarnation of It’s A Wonderful Life is the 1946 Frank Capra film, which started slow (with middling reviews) en route to hit status. In the live radio stage version (adapted by Tony Palermo), you get to see the music and the sound effects being created live, by characters in full costume. In the production co-directed by Davina Stewart and the Grindstone’s Byron Trevor Martin, Tom Edwards and Andrea House are in the Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed roles as George and Mary Bailey, with Paul Morgan Donald as Clarence. The cast also includes Colin Matty, Leona Brausen and Lee Boyes as the Bedford Falls townsfolks, with Daniel Belland at the keyboard.

It’s A Wonderful Life runs Wednesday through Sunday at the Grindstone (10019 81 Ave.). Tickets: grindstonetheatre.ca or at the door.

THE CHRISTMAS PANTO: Fort Edmonton’s vintage Capitol Theatre returns us for the fifth straight season to another sort of holiday classic, the panto. That eccentric English invention is a riotousfamily entertainment which plunders a fairy tale shamelessly, laces it liberallywith dumb jokes, songs, local references — and invites the audience to cheer the goodies and boo the baddies.

This year’s edition is Little Red Riding Hood, adapted and directed by Dana Andersen. The production stars Madelaine Knight as Little Red, an aspirational singer-songwriter (she wants to be a house concert star), and and Davina Stewart as the Wolf.

Andersen’s cast includes Melissa MacPherson and Geoff Halaby (as Mom and Grandma, the pizza guy, a story clerk, and a beach boy at Accidental Beach). You’ll hear allusions to Mill Woods and the river valley float by. The original music is by Aaron Macri.

Stewart reports that the kids in the audience have been particularly outraged by Little Red’s wayward behaviour on her journey to Grandma’s house. “What are you doing!?” screamed one little girl. “If you’d have listened to me, you wouldn’t be in this mess!”

•At the Roxy on Gateway, Oh! Christmas Tree is a new Conni Massing romantic comedy in which a marriage-bound relationship comes smack up against a classic obstacle to happiness: she really really gets into Christmas in all of its decorative family traditions; he really really doesn’t. Ergo, the tree is highly contentious. Designer Marissa Kochanski serves up a hilarious design, full of sight gags. Brian Deedrick’s production, which runs through Sunday, stars real-life couple Lora Brovold and Collin Doyle. Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca or TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca). 12thnight.ca talked to the playwright (read it here), and to the actors (read it here). And there’s a 12thnight.ca guest REVIEW by Todd Babiak, too, here.

•At the Citadel, the time is drawing nigh for the 19th (and final) return of Tom Wood’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol. A wonderful production originally directed by Bob Baker, and directed for the past several years by Wayne Paquette, it stars Julien Arnold (a former Bob Cratchit) as the frozen-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge, with Jeremy Baumung as Jacob Marley, and Mat Busby as Scrooge’s nephew Fred. It runs through Sunday. Next year, a new adaptation. 12thnight.ca looked back on 19 seasons of the show (have a peek here). And read the REVIEW here.

•At the Backstage Theatre (ATB Financial Arts Barns), The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant…Ever chronicles the fortunes of the annual small-town pageant when auditions are invaded by the dread Herdmans, “the worst kids in school.” Whizgiggling’s production runs through Sunday. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca or at the door).

Those who love Christmas tend to have trouble empathizing with those who — for no solid religious or cultural reasons — don’t feel it. From Charlie Brown and The Grinch to Ebenezer Scrooge and the incontinent drunk of Bad Santa, encouraging them to get with the yuletide program is a deep mine for entertainers.

In Oh! Christmas Tree playwright Conni Massing gives us Algar, played by Collin Doyle, a decent and loving man committed to hating Christmas. When he moves in with his girlfriend Lucy, played by his real-life partner Lora Brovold, and she breaks out the Christmas sweaters on the first of November, they both realize something: maybe, just maybe, there’s a problem.

Director Brian Deedrick keeps a lovely balance between light and dark, the twinkling tinsel and the shadowy hatchet. The core of the play is what we keep below the surface so we can enjoy that evening glass of wine together, and what we’re forced to confront. In this case: when are we getting a Christmas tree?

Massing makes a symbol and a cipher of the tree. It’s where we hang our obsessions, our nostalgia, even our quiet pain. Lucy needs her tree to get through an otherwise stressful season as an event planner, to feel that special feeling. Algar would prefer to either run away from it or, if possible, spend the holidays in his underwear with some video games.

The story meanders a bit, and some of the scenes hit the same bell. Once we understand we’re waiting for the couple’s inevitable confrontation we find ourselves mentally fast-forwarding to it. But Deedrick keeps Oh! Christmas Tree moving quickly, and Brovold and Doyle have a lot of fun veering from kind understanding to roaring misery and back again.

Lucy has a large, Christmas-blissed Scandinavian family and a nosy spiritual leader in Pastor Larson, whose on-stage representation harkens back to the parents in a Peanuts holiday special: honking. Some of the funniest moments in the play come from the essential humour in the sound of a Northern European language; we feel a bit guilty laughing at the expense of a piqued Swede, simply expressing herself. Doyle has fun as a crusading, anti-materialist teacher. If he can’t be emotionally honest with Lucy, at least he can persuade his students to burn their presents.

Every Christmas story is some version of a conversion miracle. Everything must change for Lucy and Algar, and it does. Massing avoids all of the easy routes available to the holiday playwright and rings our bells more subtly.

Merry Merry quite contrary. Some are born with the festive spirit; some achieve it, and some have it thrust upon ’em. And sometimes, as you know, seasonal high spirits have to be released (or wrestled down) against resistance. Friction is theatrical Red Bull. Here are four possibilities for your holiday entertainment on E-town stages this week.

•Oh! Christmas Tree, a new Conni Massing comedy opening tonight at the Roxy on Gateway, a relationship is under extreme pressure. Lucy and Algar find themselves on the opposite sides of a yawning gulf: one is Christmas-crazy, one is not, very not. What are their marital prospects? 12thnight.ca had the fun of talking to the playwright (read that here), and to the real-life couple, Lora Brovold and Collin Doyle, who star (read it here). Brian Deedrick’s production runs in the Roxy Performance Series through Dec. 23. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-425-1820, tixonthesquare.ca)

•You want drama? The holiday season would not feel in any way complete without a foray into the fraught world of the amateur theatrical. It reaches peak stress levels with the small-town Christmas pageant.

That’s the setting for The Best Little Newfoundland Christmas Pageant…Ever!. Whizgiggling Productions (the Edmonton indie theatre irresistibly named for the Newfoundland term for “acting silly and foolish”) takes us once more backstage on the Rock, Canada’s eastern-most and arguably most flavour-ful province. It’s the ninth annual incarnation of this riotous show, culled from a much-loved Barbara Robinson novel.

When the usual director of the Christmas pageant is out of commission, due to an unfortunate run-in with a moose, poor Mrs. O’Brien has taken the reins. The annual auditions have been overrun by “the worst kids in school,” the Herdmans, attracted by rumours of snacks. Not only are they utterly stumped by the pageant plot — “Mary ties him and shoves him in a feedbox?! Where was Child Welfare?” — these born-again thesps are after all the best parts.

What will happen to the Christmas spirit under the circumstances?

The production, which has found a new home this year at the Backstage Theatre (ATB Financial Arts Barns), stars Kayla Gorman, Natalie Czar Gummer, Cheryl Jameson, Eric Smith, Lindsey Walker and Michael Vetsch. It runs tonight and Friday, plus Dec. 18 to 23. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca), or at the door.

•A Hudson’s Bay Story, a seasonal Stewart Lemoine playlet, returns to the stage Friday and Saturday as Teatro La Quindicina’s part in BE Merry, a two-night Ballet Edmonton holiday entertainment at the Varscona. In A Hudson’s Bay Story, a disgruntled Bay menswear sales associate enters into fractious serial email exchanges to register his complaint with a woman in Toronto head office. His grievance? the inclusion of a certain carol in the store’s pre-opening music for the holiday season early shifts. Victor Morrison has his reasons, I assure you. I leave you to discuss amongst yourselves, and lay wagers, which carol it is. Jeff Haslam reprises the role.

BE Merry embeds the Lemoine playlet in an evening of festive music and dance. The latter is seven short pieces set to holiday music and choreographed by company dancers. Ballet Edmonton’s executive director Sheri Somerville hosts. And as a Christmas bonus, she’ll be singing, along with fellow Teatro stars Jocelyn Ahlf and Andrea House.

•If you haven’t seen the repertoire’s most famous skinflint reclaimed for the world of human connections yet this year, there’s still time. A Christmas Carol, the Citadel’s deluxe 19-season-old Tom Wood adaptation, runs till Dec. 23. It’s your last chance: next year, the theatre plans to mount a new version of the perennial Dickens tale of last-minute redemption. Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com.

If Lora Brovold and Collin Doyle, the real-life couple who star in Oh! Christmas Tree, have a special rapport with the characters in Conni Massing’s new comedy (opening Thursday at Theatre Network), it’s not surprising. They’ve been together for 18 years. They’ve had three Christmases together.

The pair are amply qualified, therefore, to empathize with Lucy and Algar, whose relationship, marriage-bound, has foundered on an obstacle: Christmas, the celebration and family traditions thereof, and the symbolic centre of it all: the tree.

The playwright and the director (Brian Deedrick) are immoderately amused and delighted by their casting coup. “In real life, they have something of the dynamic” of Lucy and Algar, says Massing of the couple, who made their way to a Strathcona coffee emporium to chat last weekend.

Moreover, for the theatre veterans to find themselves together onstage, for an entire play, and a Christmas play at that, defies history and probability in a striking way. They haven’t been onstage together for, well, years — 14, at least — since the premiere of Doyle and James Hamilton’s Nighthawk Rules at the Fringe of 2004, and, in a couple of fleeting scenes in Bedlam Theatre’s 25 Plays About Love a couple of years later.“We value theatre,” says Brovold cheerfully. “But we value our relationship more.”

“Conni persuaded me to persuade Collin,” grins Brovold. “And I was successful!” She remains somewhat amazed by this recruitment. For one thing, she forgot to tell him about it. “When I get busy I think I’ve said things, but only in my head.” For another, Doyle, an award-winning playwright (The Mighty Carlins, Terry and the Dog), works full-time as a TV technician at Global, on the 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. shift.

“I had conditions,” he says. “I have to start at this time and finish at that time. I can only do five hours rehearsal, and I can’t start till 2 in the afternoon…. Just so you know when we start this I don’t have a life. Working, rehearsing, sleeping, that’s it.” He grins ruefully. “I didn’t factor in time for learning lines.” Brovold laughs. “No, it’s not a movement piece!”

Collin Doyle in Oh! Christmas Tree. Photo by Ian Jackson.

So here they are, against the odds, in the same city at Christmas, in the same Christmas play. And for once, Brovold, originally from Toronto, won’t be going back to her home town for Christmas as usual. She’s already feeling guilty. “My family have this incredible, unquestioned, expectation that I’ll always be home for Christmas,” she says. When I moved away to go to university (the U of A theatre school), I’d always go back, and they built this rhythm into their lives.… It’s become a ritual for them.” To make matters worse, her brother, an RCMP officer, will be in Nunavut.

Last time Brovold wasn’t home for Christmas, her mom phoned “every two hours on Christmas Day.” Doyle could hear the ruckus. “My mom was crying, my dad was yelling, my brother left the house…. Collin says it’s because I wasn’t there to do peace-keeping.”

“Lora’s family is great,” says Doyle. “Until you get them together in the same room. They feel they should be together at Christmas, but no one gets along.”

In the fraught realm of Christmas traditions, Brovold’s are exhausting. Her usual practice is “to spend Christmas Eve with Collin, then fly home at some crazy hour and get there Christmas morning, and then be back here for New Year’s Eve.”

Doyle stays here. For one thing, there are nieces and nephews, his brother’s kids. For another,work. “When I was a waiter or someone part-time, a week off was me not making any money, and we had none! Now it’s not wanting to take a week of my vacation….” Brovold teases. “I thought you said you don’t feel like spending Christmas Day hanging out with my dad in his underwear….There’s no cable, only three channels of fuzzy movies. They like to talk and snack. And Collin likes to read books.”

“There’s nowhere to escape to,” sighs Doyle. The Doyle Christmases have a pattern, too, but “it’s pretty laid back in comparison.” On Christmas Day, he has breakfast with his parents and his sister, then on to his brother’s place to open presents with the kids, then supper. “It’s watching TV, drinking, eating.”

It is perhaps revealing that the first Brovold/Doyle Christmas together, in 2013, before they got married that summer, was, to cut to the chase, a bust. Brovold, in her element, got “a beautiful ham, with a recipe off the internet that was actually good.” Doyle was deathly ill, with pneumonia. At the fateful dinner hour, he staggered out of bed, and half a tin of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup later, returned to it.

“Why did I get such a big ham? What was I thinking?” says Brovold. “Christmas dinner is a meal on steroids….”

When you’re in a theatrical production sharing the stage with nine trees, it’s possible that the tannenbaum novelty might wear off by the 25th of December. Last weekend Brovold and Doyle didn’t have their tree up yet, but they will.

Brovold is adamant. “my first year of living in Edmonton, when I knew I’d really moved here, I bought a tree on Boxing Day…. I needed to know that I can have a tree during during December.” Her cats were small enough to sit on the branches. That tree is 15 years old now, “and no longer an environmental faux pas.”

“We do the traditional taking-down of the tree — in April,” says Doyle rolling his eyes. Says Brovold, “I aim for Valentine’s Day. But if I get busy, it might be Easter and time for the Resurrection.”

Thinking there was a shortage of photos of them together, one year Brovold took a photo of Doyle in the Citadel production of Wit and stuck it in a Christmas ornament on the tree, with a photo of her in another. His reaction? “What the hell is that? Get rid of it!” And his family reacted in similar fashion: “why are you on the tree?” Brovold laughs. “My family would be ‘awww, that’s so sweet, you guys on the tree together!’”

Yes, the Doyles do not seem to be a family awash in sentimentality. “If we’ve learned anything from The Mighty Carlins (Doyle’s very black comedy about a dysfunctional family reunion), it’s that,” says Brovold wryly. “Their sharing circle went so well!”

Brovold “loves shopping for people, giving little gifts, wrapping presentsso they’re a feast for the eyes.” The “sumptuous” is something that’s missing in our lives most of the time. Doyle is amused. “I have to appreciate the wrapping first….”

She does concede that festive rituals are largely self-generated, and pressurizing. “Even if we’re just hanging out, eating chopped vegetable and sour cream dip, and a cheese ball, it’s THE Christmas cheeseball…. What was happenstance at the time becomes a tradition. Because we did it once, suddenly it’s a thing.”

I didn’t dare ask whether Oh! Christmas Tree might be year #1 of a tradition.

Conni Massing talks to 12thnight.ca about the real-life inspiration for Oh! Christmas Tree. Read it here.

In Oh! Christmas Tree, the new Conni Massing romantic comedy that opens Thursday at Theatre Network, a relationship is under extreme pressure. Is it money? Snoring? Musical tastes? Lunatic relativies? Whether to acquire a shitsu?

No, my friends, this is serious. I return you to the the title of this, the second of two back-to-back Massing premieres this season (Workshop West’s Matara just closed) — and the festive tannenbaum. The play, part of the Roxy Performance Series, has to do with Christmas and the seasonal shrubbery, an evergreen situation so to speak — and a couple who’ve just moved in together, with impending marriage plans.Lucy, the youngest of five sisters and a party-planner by trade, is from a close-knit Scandinavian family with elaborately energetic holiday traditions. Algar, a high school social studies teacher, is none of the above. His family lives across the country, and he likes it that way.

Where on earth could such a theatrical inspiration have come from? Massing, a droll and effervescent sort with a wicked sense of humour, explains: real life. “Poor Bob,” she says of her husband. “He’s quite introverted, and I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate having any part of our lives featured in drama. But (Oh! Christmas Tree) was actually inspired by our relationship….”

playwright Connie Massing. Photo supplied.

“I’m less Christmas-mad than I used to be. But when we first got together….” Massing drifts amiably into recollection. “So we move in together, and one day I say, ‘well, maybe we can get the tree this weekend…. And Bob said, ‘uh, do we have to?’.” It stopped Massing in her tracks.

“‘Well, yeah. We have to have a Christmas tree’. He was actually really hoping we wouldn’t have to go there…. I know eh?” Massing is still awestruck by this unexpected development. “OK, not life and death. But it felt pretty big, in the context of our lives together. Was this going to be A Thing?”

“For me,” she says feelingly, “the tree is the epicentre of Christmas…. I care more about the tree than the gifts under it, really.”

In the end, Massing prevailed and they got a tree. “I’m the baby of the family and used to getting my own way; Bob is a long-suffering oldest child. But I’m more grown-up than you might imagine,” Massing laughs. For the sake of the relationship she compromised on an artificial tree, though “it sort of pains me.” She heats pine oil in an incense burner to compensate.

Naturally, Lucy and Algar aren’t exact replicas of their real-life inspirations. “There’s probably more of me in Lucy than Bob in Algar,” says Massing. She’s “so tickled!” (“it’s always been my dream with this show”) that a real-life married couple stars in the production directed by Brian Deedrick, on loan from the opera world for the occasion. You’ll meet Lora Brovold and Collin Doyle in the 12thnight.ca companion piece to this article (read it here).

“It’s one of my little theories about relationships,” says Massing, “that the thing that really draws you in a romance often has a flip side that you might not really care for when you get deeper into the exploration. The thought works its way into Oh! Christmas Tree, which began life as a 53-minute commission from Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre in 2012.

“The cheerful extroverted (aspect) of Lucy’s nature that Algar really fell in love with has a dark side, it turns out. And in the opposite direction, she loves his sardonic sense of humour. But there’s a flip side to that,” too. And it surfaces during the fa-la-la season when domestic friction really comes into its own.

Not least, Massing agrees, because there’s a kind of obligation to be happy, the unspoken cultural thought that “you’re kind of a fuck-up if you can’t get it up for Christmas.”

Agar is up against it in other ways, too. For one thing, as a teacher, he’s convinced that during the Yuletide season, “a slippery slope from Halloween,” the kids are “completely out of their minds.” Lucy’s line of work means that Christmas is her silly season.“There she is, making hats for the Mr. Lube Christmas staff party, things like that. And she’s agreed to take on a Christmas Eve wedding.”

“She has a huge kooky close-knit family,” with inviolable Yuletide traditions, of an indeterminately Scandinavian nature. In this regard, Massing, who has four siblings, extrapolates a little from her own family life, adrenalized into overdrive at Christmas. “On top of everything else, by Nov. 30 we each had to buy 24 little presents, for each day of Advent, and write a little poem to accompany each present.”

“I regress to my worst five-year-old self,” says Massing cheerfully of her personal Christmas avatar. “If I got more sleep and ate less shortbread…. Eating too much sugar is bad for people’s marriages.”

“Why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”

For 19 years, Edmonton theatre audiences have had their own special answer, hand-delivered from the stage live and in person. It’s come to us in the Citadel’s theatrically lavish, emotionally rich production of A Christmas Carol.

At its final opening night Thursday (the Citadel has announced its replacement next season by a new Christmas Carol), the sense of wonder that’s everywhere in the production conceived by playwright Tom Wood and director Bob Baker seized the audience and brought us collectively to our feet. It’s been a great run, a civic tradition that lives up to its name — a Christmas present that, unlike a pair of socks, actually lifts your spirits. You have till Dec. 23 to catch it.

Since I first saw the show in 2000, the world, arguably, has grown less hospitable, less charitable. And the journey of a frozen soul back from exile to the hearth of human connectedness, as set forth in Dickens’ iconic 1843 tale of redemption on Christmas Eve, is more heart-filling than ever.

What gives this production its special lustre?

To backtrack, the world repertoire is crammed with stage incarnations— comedies, satires, melodramas — of Christmas Carol’s familiar seasonal story of salvaging a die-hard misanthrope. The gist of many is that Ebenezer Scrooge is an old curmudgeon in a really bad mood until, whee!, he’s in a really good mood.

I’ve sat through storybook theatre versions and/or actors divvying up the costumes they’ve just discovered in a trunk, and then doing the narrative bits chorally. Narrators in top-hats (and ersatz English accents) introducing the scenes: “I take you now to the humble home of Bob Cratchit….” Musicals with pop songs, or dance breaks, or audience participation carolling (sometimes with song sheets) to show we’re all in this together.

I remember writing after one particularly egregious example that you couldn’t help but feel a flicker of sympathy for the growly guy who eats low-cal by himself on Christmas Eve, and flatly refuses to go to his nephew’s place the next day for dinner and party games. That may well have been the same season I had one of my worst ideas ever, a “Bah! Humbug!” contest for the public. God help us, every one.

But I digress. I’ve had 19 opening nights now, to ponder this deluxe production. It’s inspiring to see the full resources of a major theatre and artists at the top of their game devote themselves to a story that, in other versions, is often reduced to a schematic seasonal entertainment. The ingenious theatricality of the production is in the unusual synchronicity of design (by Leslie Frankish, with Robert Thomson’s lighting and Michael Becker’s sound) and stagecraft.

Glenn Nelson as Scrooge, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

Things aren’t just recounted; they happen onstage. Scrooge’s angry journey though the bustle of Dickensian London and his night of terrors, propelled by phantoms back and then forward in time, are set in motion by the cast themselves. They reconfigure lamp posts and staircases, in a design that opens, layer after layer, like a magic box.

The past, the present, and the future seem to cohabit one mind. In Wood’s adaptation, the word “change” permeates the air, from the obsequies of Scrooge’s partner Jacob Marley to Scrooge’s encounter with the chilling Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come and beyond, to the rebirth of a man on Christmas morning.

Since the initial run of Wood himself as Scrooge for the first 11 seasons of the production — an acidic humorist and connoisseur of human absurdity who’s rotted from within — every Scrooge has been individual and distinctive in personality and tone. Richard McMillan, James MacDonald, Glenn Nelson, John Wright, and now Julien Arnold (alternating with Nelson) have made the role their own.

Some performances (McMillan and MacDonald spring to mind) are chiselled from perma-frost. Arnold, who amazingly became Scrooge last season from being Bob Cratchit,isn’t of the icy and withdrawn school of Scrooge-ism. The performance has a kind of furious exuberance about it; there’s something energetic, actively outgoing about the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” in this Scrooge. And the transmutation of that forcefulness into joy on Christmas morning is something to cherish. He’s irresistible.

The cast rises to the occasion. I’m singling out Sheldon Elter as the good-hearted Bob, Beth Graham as fierce and plucky Mrs. Cratchit, Mat Busby as Scrooge’s ever-cordial ever-hopeful nephew Fred, Oscar Derkx as the younger and gradually hardening Scrooge, Patricia Darbasie as Scrooge’s charwoman Mrs. Dilber, Jeremy Baumung as the tortured ghost of Jacob Marley, Ashley Wright as the inherently celebratory Mr. Fezziwig. But the whole all-Edmonton ensemble, including Sasha Rybalko as Tiny Tim, is excellent.Under Wayne Paquette’s direction, parallel scenes chez Cratchit and Fred, designed to reveal a similar festive spirit, inhabit the stage zestfully. The busy-ness of the stage never seems forced.

I wrote earlier this week about A Christmas Carol as a seminal event in Edmonton theatre, a labour of love where whole theatre careers have been forged (read it here). Thursday night, it was the shared experience of being in the audience, unlocking something precious, a sense of wonder.

“Why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”

For 19 years, Edmonton theatre audiences have had their own special answer, hand-delivered from the stage live and in person. It’s come to us in the Citadel’s theatrically lavish, emotionally rich production of A Christmas Carol.

At its final opening night Thursday (the Citadel has announced its replacement next season by a new Christmas Carol), the sense of wonder that’s everywhere in the production conceived by playwright Tom Wood and director Bob Baker seized the audience and brought us collectively to our feet. It’s been a great run, a civic tradition that lives up to its name — a Christmas present that, unlike a pair of socks, actually lifts your spirits. You have till Dec. 23 to catch it.

Since I first saw the show in 2000, the world, arguably, has grown less hospitable, less charitable. And the journey of a frozen soul back from exile to the hearth of human connectedness, as set forth in Dickens’ iconic 1843 tale of redemption on Christmas Eve, is more heart-filling than ever.

What gives this production its special lustre?

To backtrack, the world repertoire is crammed with stage incarnations— comedies, satires, melodramas — of Christmas Carol’s familiar seasonal story of salvaging a die-hard misanthrope. The gist of many is that Ebenezer Scrooge is an old curmudgeon in a really bad mood until, whee!, he’s in a really good mood.

I’ve sat through storybook theatre versions and/or actors divvying up the costumes they’ve just discovered in a trunk, and then doing the narrative bits chorally. Narrators in top-hats (and ersatz English accents) introducing the scenes: “I take you now to the humble home of Bob Cratchit….” Musicals with pop songs, or dance breaks, or audience participation carolling (sometimes with song sheets) to show we’re all in this together.

I remember writing after one particularly egregious example that you couldn’t help but feel a flicker of sympathy for the growly guy who eats low-cal by himself on Christmas Eve, and flatly refuses to go to his nephew’s place the next day for dinner and party games. That may well have been the same season I had one of my worst ideas ever, a “Bah! Humbug!” contest for the public. God help us, every one.

But I digress. I’ve had 19 opening nights now, to ponder this deluxe production. It’s inspiring to see the full resources of a major theatre and artists at the top of their game devote themselves to a story that, in other versions, is often reduced to a schematic seasonal entertainment. The ingenious theatricality of the production is in the unusual synchronicity of design (by Leslie Frankish, with Robert Thomson’s lighting and Michael Becker’s sound) and stagecraft.

Glenn Nelson as Scrooge, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

Things aren’t just recounted; they happen onstage. Scrooge’s angry journey though the bustle of Dickensian London and his night of terrors, propelled by phantoms back and then forward in time, are set in motion by the cast themselves. They reconfigure lamp posts and staircases, in a design that opens, layer after layer, like a magic box.

The past, the present, and the future seem to cohabit one mind. In Wood’s adaptation, the word “change” permeates the air, from the obsequies of Scrooge’s partner Jacob Marley to Scrooge’s encounter with the chilling Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come and beyond, to the rebirth of a man on Christmas morning.

Since the initial run of Wood himself as Scrooge for the first 11 seasons of the production — an acidic humorist and connoisseur of human absurdity who’s rotted from within — every Scrooge has been individual and distinctive in personality and tone. Richard McMillan, James MacDonald, Glenn Nelson, John Wright, and now Julien Arnold (alternating with Nelson) have made the role their own.

Some performances (McMillan and MacDonald spring to mind) are chiselled from perma-frost. Arnold, who amazingly became Scrooge last season from being Bob Cratchit,isn’t of the icy and withdrawn school of Scrooge-ism. The performance has a kind of furious exuberance about it; there’s something energetic, actively outgoing about the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” in this Scrooge. And the transmutation of that forcefulness into joy on Christmas morning is something to cherish. He’s irresistible.

The cast rises to the occasion. I’m singling out Sheldon Elter as the good-hearted Bob, Beth Graham as fierce and plucky Mrs. Cratchit, Mat Busby as Scrooge’s ever-cordial ever-hopeful nephew Fred, Oscar Derkx as the younger and gradually hardening Scrooge, Patricia Darbasie as Scrooge’s charwoman Mrs. Dilber, Jeremy Baumung as the tortured ghost of Jacob Marley, Ashley Wright as the inherently celebratory Mr. Fezziwig. But the whole all-Edmonton ensemble, including Sasha Rybalko as Tiny Tim, is excellent.Under Wayne Paquette’s direction, the parallel scenes chez Cratchit and Fred, designed to reveal a similar festive spirit, inhabit the stage zestfully. The busy-ness of the stage never seems forced.

I wrote earlier this week about A Christmas Carol as a seminal event in Edmonton theatre, a labour of love where whole theatre careers have been forged (read it here). Thursday night, it was the shared experience of being in the audience, releasing something precious, a sense of wonder.

“Christmas, sir, is a cheat!” snaps Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge with a grimace of distaste that may strike a chord in your own soul — especially if you’ve done time in a mall, barraged by retail jollity and the seasonal oeuvre of Mariah Carey.

For 18 seasons, the Citadel’s bountiful production of A Christmas Carol, adapted by actor/playwright Tom Wood and brought to the stage by director Bob Baker, has been a glorious counter-argument to Bah! Humbug!. And Edmonton has taken it to heart.

Thursday night is an historic event in the civic archive. It’s the 19th, and final, opening night of a production that has become a bona fide Christmas tradition in these parts. And it’s remarkable not only for its longevity but its thrilling theatrical ingenuity, its emotional complexity, its audience bonding. Next year, the Citadel plans to unveil a new adaptation of Dickens’ celebrated 1843 ghost story novella; that Christmas Carol Yet To Come remains shrouded in mystery.

When A Christmas Carol opened in December 2000 on the Citadel’s open, no-secrets Maclab thrust stage — a single urchin in a pool of light sings God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and vanishes —Cheryl Hoover, stage manager at the time, now the Citadel’s Director of Production, was holding her breath. She didn’t exhale till intermission.

It was, is, after all, a huge show by any measure — “one of the most complex I’ve ever worked on, and one of the best,” says Hoover. The costumed cast of 39, nearly half of them kids ages seven to 15, are in perpetual motion. So is Leslie Frankish’s design, built entirely in-house. It looks like a vintage Victorian card. And it opens up like a magic Christmas box and then a snow globe, to reveal the world, indoors and out-, of an ossified misanthrope whose soul is reconstituted on Christmas Eve in a last-ditch intervention from the spirit world.

Glenn Nelson as Scrooge, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Epic Photography.

Street lamps and staircases are reconfigured constantly by half-lit “human manpower,” as Hoover says of the “150 scenery moves” in the show. They’re executed — in a “choreographed dance” as Hoover puts it — as Mr. Scrooge stomps furiously through London’s crowded streets, past arcades of shops, from the chilly offices of Marley & Scrooge to his own bleak vaulted chambers. The journey orchestrated by the three ghosts takes the frozen-hearted Ebenezer back into his own past and the roots of his soulless avarice, and forward through space and time, even into the grave and back, in a swirl of dramatically escalating scenes.

Julien Arnold as Bob Cratchit. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

Hoover tots up the person-power. “it took about 100 wardrobe, wig- and facial hair makers, carpenters, prop builders, painters, electricians, audio (specialists), riggers and stage craftspeople to build the show,” including its 1500 costume pieces. And it takes a crew of 20 to run every performance, with its 750 sound and 250 lighting cues.

There’s music: the late Michael Becker’s cinematic soundscape of familiar carols filtering through an unearthly musical ether. There’s magic: Scrooge’s door knocker transforms into face of his late and unlamented parter Jacob Marley; his bell lifts off the table of its own volition. The magic is low-tech but tricky on a thrust stage where there’s no proscenium to hide behind. And there are ghosts who preside over Scrooge’s Christmas Eve reclamation for humanity.

A Christmas Carol is so intricately put together that, in its premiere year, as Hoover reports, “it took us two hours to tech from the end of the opening scene” ( in which we’re watching Marley’s funeral through the fog) to lights-up in the next, a bustling scene of shoppers, vendors and street people — less than a minute in the play. When the show went into its first preview with an audience, “it was our first full run-through.”

“That night was my Christmas miracle,” says Hoover. Michelle Chan, then the assistant stage manager and now the Citadel’s resident S.M., echoes the thought. “It’s a feeling that I will never forget, and I still have that feeling on this show every year. There’s something truly magical and transformative about this production and how the audience reacts to it.”

Pulling it off with four weeks’ rehearsal that first year was a race against time and improbability. Naturally, there have been glitches: improv time in live theatre, and a test of stage managerial nerves.

At one first-year matinee, for example, someone “absent-mindedly plugged in something in the trap room…” says Hoover, “causing a power overload. So (Scrooge’s) bed coming out of the floor came to a halt midway rising out of the floor.” Oops.

At one Year 2 performance, the ghost of Scrooge’s late and unlamented partner Marley couldn’t connect his harness to the rig that flies him magically out the window — as per Wood’s blithe stage direction “Marley lifts into the air and floats out the window.” Sothe actor, the late Larry Yachimec, had to walk off instead. He cleverly “exited into the closet door,” Hoover says. “Truly magical…. Problem-solving in an instant is one of the thrills of live theatre.”

Hoover remembers the time the cemetery scene ran over its own cable (en route to the stage) and abruptly halted. In the total blackness, one crew member rushed on, and tripped and rolled over another. “Keystone Kops,” says the imperturbable Hoover, watching on her infrared monitor.

James MacDonald as Ebenezer Scooge, A Christmas Carol. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

To say there’s a show-behind-the-show isn’t just a fanciful truism in a production as complicated as A Christmas Carol. In Year 6, a new sound operator arrived. To give the newcomer a fighting chance with the barrage of cues, Hoover remembers that Michelle Chan and head electrician Sheila Cleasby (who like Chan is a 19-year veteran of A Christmas Carol) “acted out the entire show so I could call all those sound cues for our new guy to practice.”

Tom Wood as Scrooge. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

A long-run on the page makes a classic. A long-run on the stage — especially if it happens but once a year, with veterans, newcomers, and lots of kids (and growth spurts) — makes a classic crisis, potentially. Scrooge can get a year or two or seven older (“and not an hour richer,” as he points out acidly). But, face it, it just looks wrong if the Cratchit kids are college age. In 19 seasons of Christmas Carols, families of actors, and generations of kids, have grown up (many of them into acting careers) declaring ‘Merry Christmas!’ in November. And they’ve graduated to other roles in the show as they grew.

The Cratchits. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

Maralyn Ryan, who played Scrooge’s charwoman Mrs. Dilber for 14 years, has been in A Christmas Carol with both her daughters Kate and Bridget Ryan, and her granddaughter Emma Wilmott. The Dowler-Coltmans, Jordan, Braydon and Tim, have occupied a range of Cratchit roles (this year Braydon is in the show as Joseph). The Cheladyn’s — dad Mitch and his two daughters Lea and Tatiana — were in the show together for years.

In 19 Christmas Carols, a small but distinguished coterie of actors has delivered ‘Bah, Humbug!’ from the Citadel stage. For the first 11 seasons, Wood himself was the flinty Ebenezer, “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone” and poster-boy for spiritual makeovers. It’s a big role (Scrooge is onstage for all but six minutes), and as fashioned by Wood the playwright, an unusually complex one, in an adaptation that’s all about the human capacity for change and redemption. As Hoover says, “if we are overjoyed to see that change in the ‘wake up’ scene, Scrooge has done his job. The message that it’s never too late is so important.”

Richard McMillan as Scrooge. Photo supplied by Citadel Theatre.

The late Stratford and Tarragon star Richard McMillan took on the role in 2010 for a couple of seasons. James MacDonald, now the artistic director of Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops, was either Scrooge or Marley for six. John Wright has been a Citadel Scrooge. And as a startling testimonial to versatility, the production’s original Bob Cratchit, Julien Arnold, moved fromthat assignment as the big-hearted victim of Victorian injustice to the old skinflint himself. You’ll see him as Scrooge again this year (alternating with Glenn Nelson), with Sheldon Elter as Bob.

The Cratchit with the crutch might only be in three scenes and the finale of A Christmas Carol, but he does get the big showstopper line and the signature prop. Downside? he has to stay petit — small enough for Bob Cratchit to lift up onto his shoulder. Danielle Checknita at 11 was the first Tiny Tim, who graduated to “Numerous Boys” the next year, and “girl roles” after that. Emma Houghton, currently on the Citadel mainstage as the flighty Lydia in Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, has been a Tiny Tim.

The first boy Tiny Tim was Ben Wheelwright, at 9, in 2002. He was the youngest of the Scrooges two years later, as well as Monkey Boy, assistant to the pawnbroker Old Joe, who ends up with Scrooge’s bed linen. These days Wheelwright is on Broadway, in the two-part Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and before that The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time.

In the great arc of Citadel Christmas Carols, careers have been honed. Wayne Paquette, a 17-season veteran of the show, has been apprentice stage manager, assistant stage manager, assistant director, and for the last two years, director.

For Michelle Chan, “it’s been so very important…. It was my very first show at the Citadel and I feel so proud to have been involved from the beginning. It has made me a stronger stage manager and I have developed some amazing friendships out of it…. It is always the start of my real Christmas season and it will hold a special place for me always.” As Hoover says, “how wonderful to know you are part of someone’s yearly tradition….”

“Tis the season when abundance rejoices,” says one Victorian worthy in A Christmas Carol. And abundant this production of A Christmas Carol has been. For that big, celebratory emotional experience, year after year, we’re grateful.